Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Desperation would then set in - and Microsoft would then reveal, that by the way, it had a few portable applications lying around which could be quickly adapted to work on these hardware platforms. More sales, more money for Gates and Allen. And, writes Cringely, this was just the first of many times the company coordinated its operating system and applications strategy, which it will never admit doing. It happened for every new platform and version of MS-DOS.
When business tactics were not available, there were technology tricks to defeat rivals - when Netscape Navigator showed signs of dominating the browser market, Microsoft licensed the Spyglass Mosaic browser in 1995 for $US2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer. This browser was then made part of the Windows operating system, providing functionality that a mere application, running on top of the operating system, could not. (One by-product of this integration was the way it allowed all of kinds of viruses and worms to cause havoc).
Microsoft has used code from innumerable projects and, when caught, often settles out of court. In some cases, Microsoft is brazen enough to appeal against such judgements though in the end it ends up paying more. Microsoft has also been convicted of monopoly practices and the EU continues to monitor it even now.
In fact, Microsoft is the only major software company to be convicted of piracy - it paid a three million French franc fine for stealing code. In 1994, the Commercial Court of Nanterre fined Microsoft because it had illegally included another company's proprietary source code in SoftImage 3D, a top-level animation package that it acquired from SoftImage in 1994.
Due to the shoddy practices, Windows has been haunted all its life by poor security and poor performance. In a world where many others did not stoop so low as he did, Gates has succeeded in accumulating a huge fortune. In terms of money, he has made it. In terms of software, he has little respect from his peers.
When a man of his prominence gets older, the question of the legacy he leaves tends to become a source of bother. Gates has gone the way of Nixon and McNamara - he now wants to put a halo round his head.
And in that enterprise, the BBC has been a more than willing partner. Well done, Fiona Bruce.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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